“Genie” was written by Richard Curtis (it’s a remake of his 1991 British television film “Bernard and the Genie”), but the movie, while set in New York at Christmastime, is no “Love Actually.” It’s more like “Elf” crossed with “Love Sort Of.” When Flora, whose full name is Flora Gwendolyn Lockheed Firepit McCallister, says those magic words “Your wish is my command,” she’s speaking to Bernard (Paapa Essiedu), who accidentally summoned her out of that box. He’s a transplanted Brit who works at a tony Manhattan art auction house — or did, until he was fired, only to come home having missed his daughter’s eighth birthday celebration. That’s the last straw for his wife, Julie (Denée Benton), who announces that she’s going to be taking some time away from him.

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The way all this plays out is lighter than balsa wood. Richard Curtis made his name investing romantic comedy with a surprise spark of humanity (“Four Weddings and a Funeral,” “Notting Hill”), but “Genie” really is a glorified sitcom — or, more to the point, a genie-out-of-water comedy.

The BBC's Mark Kermode, another Howard the Duck champion, argues that it's not a "great" movie, but remains "a really, really funny weird, subversive film." Since it was too weird to be embraced by the mainstream, but also too entertainingly off-kilter to forget, Kermode has argued for Howard the Duck as basically the definition of a cult classic. It's worth noting that Katz and Huyck began their creative collaboration with a legitimate cult film: the surreal horror masterpiece Messiah of Evil. I would love to see those two bonkers movies on a double bill (OK, pun intended).

For me, the real revelation of Howard the Duck was the last hour, in which the film suddenly becomes a body horror comedy. Howard and Beverley are stuck with a gnarly possessed scientist (played by Jeffrey Jones, one thing about the film that hasn't aged well) playing host to one of the hideous "Dark Overlords of the Universe" that want to destroy this world. Sure, I had already seen Halloween and The Thing at that age. But I did so through my fingers, as they were meant to scare the daylights out of you — and succeeded. Ghostbusters, meanwhile, just seemed silly to me.

Howard the Duck managed to hit the sweet spot between gross-out tentacled latex monsters and fun adventure comedy. It was the kind of "scary" an 11-year-old could enjoy without fear and showed me that horror flicks could be more like a roller coaster ride than a grueling night in a haunted house. It set me up for teenage years spent reading Fangoria magazines, making latex masks in the basement, and laughing at every Freddy Krueger punchline, no matter how cheesy.

And now, with the MCU an established film phenomenon and Howard popping up in Guardians of the Galaxy films, maybe we'll finally get a sequel.

When the holiday season's hottest new toy, the Tickle-Me Wiggly, hits the shelves, the city of Hatchetfield goes mad for it, literally. That's when Tom Houston, Lex Foster, Becky Barnes and a few familiar faces, must fight through a sea of murderous mall-goers to save humanity from an inter dimensional being with a taste for chaos. When Wiggly comes to town, will the world survive Black Friday.

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On Thanksgiving night, a group of disgruntled toy store employees begrudgingly arrive for work to open the store at midnight for the busiest shopping day of the year. Meanwhile, an alien parasite crashes to Earth in a meteor. This group of misfits led by store manager Jonathan and longtime employee Ken soon find themselves battling against hordes of holiday shoppers who have been turned into monstrous creatures hellbent on a murderous rampage on Black Friday.

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Surprise Thanksgiving film as it's about chickens but then, that's Troma for you.

When the American Chicken Bunker, a military-themed fried-chicken chain, builds a restaurant on the site of an ancient Indian burial ground, local protesters aren't the only ones crying fowl! The previous tenants, fueled by a supernatural force, take "possession" of the food and those who eat it, and the survivors discover that they must band together before they themselves become the other white meat! Film lovers have been starved for sustenance. The relentless diet of predictability and pretense Hollywood has been serving up just doesn't cut it. Poultrygeist is hearty food for thought. In Poultrygeist, Troma takes on the the fast-food industry-skewering the soulless restaurateurs-in the world's first horror-comedy film to feature zombie chickens, American Indians and a bit of singing and dancing! It's Poultrygeist!

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Full movie on the Internet Archive

Another Thanksgiving movie:

When a dysfunctional family goes to their recently widowed grandmother's cabin for Thanksgiving, they find out that their grandmother is actually a werewolf.

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Full movie thanks to the director

Happy ThanksKilling everyone!

A homicidal turkey axes off college kids during Thanksgiving break.

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Adapted into a musical.

There is a sequel:

• ThanksKilling 3

And, yes, they skipped ThanksKilling 2 because... well it's complicated.

After scaring up $18 million in theaters earlier this year, horror-comedy The Blackening is getting a sequel from Lionsgate, Variety has exclusively announced this afternoon.

Variety notes, “producer MRC and domestic distributor Lionsgate have entered into talks with Dewayne Perkins, Tracy Oliver and producer E. Brian Dobbins to develop a follow-up film.”

The first film was made on a production budget of just $5 million, so there’s needless to say lots of potential for this to become a profitable Scary Movie-type horror franchise.

A homicidal car tire, discovering it has destructive psionic power, sets its sights on a desert town once a mysterious woman becomes its obsession.

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"I've heard some rumors about it," he tells us of a potential follow-up. "But I don't know anything yet. But I feel pretty confident that it may happen." When we ask if he'd be happy to return, Pine responds: "Absolutely."

The MVD Rewind Collection is preparing a Blu-ray release of Ernie Fosselius's Hardware Wars (1978). The release is scheduled to arrive on the market on February 20.

Descriptin: In 1978 writer / director Ernie Fosselius (former member of "The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo") created the very first "Star Wars" parody, HARDWARE WARS. Complete with cardboard sets and visible wires (holding up ships which were various household appliances), the film was shot over four days with a budget of around $8,000. Now, nearly 50 years later, the original version of this classic short that George Lucas called his "favorite Star Wars parody" (in a 1999 interview on the UK's The Big Breakfast TV show) has been restored in High Definition for a whole new generation of cult movie fans to discover!

Tech specs: Blu-ray.com

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In screenwriter Michael Kennedy’s newest project, It’s a Wonderful Knife, a teen girl who wishes she had never been born sees visions of an alternate reality in which the serial killer she stopped is allowed to run rampant through the town. It’s a Wonderful Knife takes obvious inspiration from the high-concept classic It’s a Wonderful Life, Just as Happy Death Day does with Groundhog Day and Freaky does with Freaky Friday. The planned Happy Death Day and Freaky crossover may no longer be happening, but with It’s a Wonderful Knife, Kennedy is delivering a worthy successor and capping off an unofficial trilogy of high-concept slasher retellings.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/8307627

Cohen the Barbarian was angry. Angry that he never died in battle, angry that the world had forgotten him, and angry that his knees were starting to play up in the cold.

He was also angry that his faithful mount had been gifted the ability of magical speech. The horse was insisting that they had made a wrong turn back at Slice.

He was also angry that the horse was probably right.

This was not how it was supposed to end for the barbarian. This was not how the Discworld’s greatest hero imagined it at all.

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TROLL BRIDGE is a love-letter to Terry Pratchett and Discworld. It exists because an awful lot of people thought it ought to.

The film is adapted from the short story 'Troll Bridge', published in the anthology 'A Blink of the Screen': https://discworld.com/?s=blink+of+the+screen

Special thanks to The Pratchett Estate, Discworld.com, The Foundry, Shotgun Software, GarageFarm.NET Render Farm, Golaem, our 300 volunteers, and over 4,500 backers. Every frame pressed with love – this is your production.

Official Website: https://www.trollbridge.film

Santastein tells the story “of two friends (Max & Paige) with a rather peculiar hobby, they like to bring things back from the dead. With their first successful rodent resurrection, they set their sights on something bigger, following in the footsteps of Frankenstein himself. When they decide to bring back the body of a man dressed like Santa Claus, Max feels it is his chance to right the wrongs of his past; having accidentally killed Father Christmas when he was six. What they don’t realize is that instead of a jolly gift giver, they unleash a bloodthirsty monster. When Santa attacks their friend’s Christmas party, it’s up to them to take the holiday icon down.”

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Minnie Bouvèé (Swanson) is a Mob Queen in the French Quarter of New Orleans with an ongoing rivalry with arch-nemesis Poodle Mackenzie (Jennifer McClain). After Minnie has Poodle's crew brutally slaughtered, she's ready for the fallout. What she doesn't expect is to be stalked by a shadowy figure who has a penchant for leaving behind gardenias and worrisome notes. Minnie finds she must uncover the truth: whether this is Poodle's revenge or just her own estranged sister's strange way of saying hi when she reappears in Minnie's life after stealing Minnie's man.

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The trailer for Big Easy Queens sets the stage for a showdown between criminal enterprises and the undead horrors haunting the streets of New Orleans. A bunch of unconnected scenes give a taste of the humor and camp that permeates the film. From zombie screams to drag glam, this film is sure to delight and surprise its audience as it delivers a hilarious new entry to the queer horror subgenre.

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The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a comedy science fiction franchise created by Douglas Adams. Originally a 1978 radio comedy broadcast on BBC Radio 4, it was later adapted to other formats, including novels, stage shows, comic books, a 1981 TV series, a 1984 text adventure game, and 2005 feature film.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is an international multimedia phenomenon; the novels are the most widely distributed, having been translated into more than 30 languages by 2005. The first novel, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979), has been ranked fourth on the BBC's The Big Read poll. The sixth novel, And Another Thing..., was written by Eoin Colfer with additional unpublished material by Douglas Adams. In 2017, BBC Radio 4 announced a 40th-anniversary celebration with Dirk Maggs, one of the original producers, in charge. The first of six new episodes was broadcast on 8 March 2018.

Community:

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When an archaeologist uncovers a strange skull in a foreign land, the residents of a nearby town begin to disappear, leading to further inexplicable occurrences.

Based on characters created by Matt Wagner and Neil Gaiman, and now technically a spinoff of Netflix’s The Sandman series that Gaiman’s working on (as they are in the comics), the series stars George Rexstrew and Jayden Revri respectively as Charles Rowland and Edward Paine. Though they died decades apart from each other, they caught on real well as friends and decided that instead of passing on to the afterlife, they’d be better suited as a pair of ghost detectives in the mortal realm. With the help of their clairvoyant friends Crystal Palace (Kassius Nelson) and Niko Sasasi (Yuyu Kitamura), the boys solve supernatural crimes, all the while avoiding witches, the forces of Hell, and anyone who may want to send them onto the next stage of their afterlives.

Though Gaiman and Wagner created the Dead Boy Detectives for The Sandman #25 in 1991, the pair truly sprung to life thanks to a spinoff comic from Toby Litt and Mark Buckingham released throughout 2014. By that point, the pair had made sporadic appearances throughout the Sandman universe, in turn inspiring the release of the comic. Looking back on the duo, Gaiman recalled to Tudum their’ “good-heartedness and dedication” as the reason for their extended popularity. “Who amongst us can honestly say that if we were hanging around the Earth as a ghost we wouldn’t want to start a detective agency?”

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cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/4456057

A bawdy comedy musical will blend classic shlock sci-fi and the British tradition of pantomimes into a new Christmas adventure.

Tide Nor Time Players are performing a new, original comedy musical for Christmas entitled Lance McKrack and the Dr X. Mass Adventure.

Lance McKrack and his trusty crew must battle the evil Professor Brainovski to save Dr X. Mass before it’s too late and Christmas is stolen from the galaxy.

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The production will be in the grand tradition of classic 1950s science fiction films such as Forbidden Planet.

There will be an eclectic mix of music, comedy, silliness for the kids and bawdy humour for the adults.

Shows will be performed at The Depozitory, Ryde on December 16 at 6.30pm and on December 17 at 2pm and 6.30pm.

The film stars Jeremy Davies (Saving Private Ryan, The Black Phone) as convicted arsonist Sam Wanoutsky who “is the middle of hosting his own conspiracy podcast, The Naked Umbrella, when his trailer home explodes and burns to the ground. Convinced he's been set up, Sam hits the road with his wife, Irene, to clear his name. Now off his meds, and with his parole officer hot on his tail, Sam's psychosis returns as he traverses his relationship with reality and his eternal love for his wife.”

As the night draw in, out minds tirnto.classic. Christmas movies,Ike Gremlins!

When Billy Peltzer is given a small creature called a Mogwai by his father, he is unaware of the carnage he is about to encounter. There is a huge responsibility in looking after Gizmo as there are certain rules which must be followed. The Mogwai must be kept away from bright light, never made wet and never, ever be fed after midnight. When an accident occurs involving Gizmo and water, the next evolution stage of the Mogwai appears, and it isn't nice at all.